Action

Escape Plan

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Escape Plan
  • IMDB: link

Escape PlanSylvester Stallone thrown into prison at the whims of a madman is hardly a new story (the plots of both Tango & Cash and Lock-Up include these themes). In Escape Plan, Stallone stars as expert prison escape artist Joe Bresslin who has been working for the last several years to find holes in various prison systems, 14 of which he’s successfully escaped.

After a brief introduction involving Breslin’s escape from his latest job, he and his associates (Amy Ryan, 50 Cent, Vincent D’Onofrio) are approached by a CIA agent (Caitriona Balfe) offering $5,000,000 to Breslin to test out the government’s top secret, and privately run, new rendition facility for those criminals too dangerous to house on U.S. soil once Guantanamo Bay is closed down for good.

Breslin accepts the job, despite the fact that his location will be kept completely secret from his team, meaning he will be going in blind without back-up (breaking all of his usual rules). Of course, it doesn’t take long before things go wrong.

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Kick-Ass 2

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  • Title: Kick-Ass 2
  • IMDB: link

Kick-Ass 2The work of comic writer Mark Millar (Wanted, Kick-Ass) is an acquired taste. Although he writes super-hero comics, complete with brightly-colored masks and spandex, his gritty nihilistic visions often don’t paint a very rosy picture of the world which he seems to believe are predominantly filled with irrevocably fucked-up human beings.

Realizing this, the original Kick-Ass movie made some big changes to the source material. The choice to undercut some of the more gruesome elements with humor worked in its favor (as it does with the sequel). However, the sequel is also stuck with a couple of large plot changes that have to be addressed in Kick-Ass 2.

The first movie saw Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) get the girl (something not even considered a remote possibility in the original work). The problem of what to do with Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca) is easily handled as the movie quickly, much to my disappointment, writes Fonseca’s character out of the movie never to be heard from, or spoken of, again.

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The Wolverine

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  • Title: The Wolverine
  • IMDB: link

The Wolverine

Taking place several months after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand (yes, this movie states the atrocity that was Lamest Stand counts as X-Men movie canon), The Wolverine picks up with a haunted Logan (Hugh Jackman) coerced out of his cave by an assassin (Rila Fukushima) and taken to Japan for a meeting with an old friend (Hal Yamanouchi) who wants to repay Wolverine for saving his life at Nagasaki more than 70 years ago (in a terrific sequence) by offering the hero turned hermit the one thing denied to him – morality.

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Red 2

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  • Title: Red 2
  • IMDB: link

Red 2Not every movie deserves a sequel. Based on the early 2000’s comic from Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, Red was good dumb fun about retired spies forced to get back into the game when their past caught up with them. Not straining any brain muscles, the sequel is roughly the same premise as Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), Marvin (John Malkovich), and Frank’s girlfriend Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) find themselves marked for death based on Frank and Marvin’s part in a secret operation more than three decades ago.

The movie begins in much the same way as another of Willis’ regrettable sequels as the former spy attempts to lay low in the suburbs with a girlfriend who wants more crazy adventures. Forced on the run, the threesome are pursued by the world’s best hitman (Byung-hun Lee) with a personal score to settle, as well as Victoria (Helen Mirren) who is ordered by MI6 to put Frank and Marvin in the ground. Brian Cox reprises his role as Ivan, and the movie also offers up Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Russian spy who has Frank wrapped around her little finger and Anthony Hopkins as a mad scientist locked away for 30 years.

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Turbo

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Turbo
  • IMDB: link

TurboTurbo is a good reminder that most animated movies fail to reach the heights or depths of live-action theatrical films. Most fall somewhere in-between. That’s not to say this tale about a snail competing in the Indianapolis 500 isn’t a good movie. Turbo is a cute, fun, and mostly entertaining 96-minute story about chasing impossible dreams and the complicated relationships between brothers that’s likely to please, but not wow, the whole family.

Our story centers around two pairs of brothers who share quite a bit in common even though one pair is human and the other are snails. We’re introduced first to Theo (Ryan Reynolds), the dreamer who yearns of nothing more than being fast enough to race his idol (a charismatic human driver voiced by Bill Hader), and his far more down-to-earth brother Chet (Paul Giamatti).

A pair of accidents involving Theo get the pair banished from their garden home and provide Theo with the unbelievable speed which allows the snail to chase his dreams.

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